I think I might have mentioned that I worked at the Library of Congress this summer, down in the Preservation Directorate. The LC is made up of three buildings; I was working in the Madison Building, which was built the latest and is considered the ugliest of the three.
This is the oldest, and nicest building, the Jefferson. If you take a tour of the LC, this is the building you'll be touring, since it's really beautifully decorated. (Sadly, the tour does not let you actually read any of the books, but I think it's worth seeing anyway.)
Awesomely enough, the three buildings of the LC (Jefferson, Adams, Madison) are actually connected by an elaborate tunnel system. It makes getting lost a little easier, admittedly, but still. Tunnels! Tunnels are cool! You're walking dozens of feet underneath pavement and tourists and speeding cars, and they never know you're there!
Sightseeing aside, I <em>was</em> actually legitimately occupied this summer, working in Preservation. I'm going to have a lot of pictures in this explanation, so for the sake of your bandwidth (for those of you still using bandwidth) I'm going to put the entire explanation under a cut.
So, preservation. There are all sort of preservation — art, artifacts, furniture, paper, etc. etc. For the past two years, I've been working with book preservation, starting with simple paper repairs and pamphlet binds (taking a flimsy pamphlet or thin book and sewing it into a flexible but more durable binding) and moving onto more complicated repairs, which can vary from replacing simply the spine of a book cover to replacing the entire case itself.
It's easy to damage books. Wear and tear, water damage, tape residue... the possibilities are endless. Moreover, because a lot of book-binders through the years have been more focused on profit margins than longevity, the quality of the paper and binding can vary wildly. I've worked with a lot of books from the nineteenth century just because the general quality was so abysmal.
So, say I'm recasing a book. First, I'll have to take the text block out of the case:
See the numbers and letters written on the spine? Part of the cloth spine was ripped off, so someone just wrote the call number on the exposed part of the text block spine. This book also had a few gatherings and pages loose at the front, which meant that I had to reattach the page leaves and then sew the gatherings back to the text block.
You may also notice that there's printing on the spine, beyond the call number:
A lot of binders used to use scrap paper as a spine lining. Some older books even used scrap paper in the case itself; there are theories that scraps of Shakespeare's scripts may still exist, in the cases of other books. A scrap of an ancient Icelandic manuscript was found that way in a book in the Folger Library.
It's usually good to remove as much of the spine lining as possible when recasing a book, though — which can be a massive pain, since usually underneath that scrap paper, there's a ton of old glue, which both smells terrible and can be incredibly difficult to remove without tearing the paper. It's important, though, since you need to line the spine (to protect the textblock and provide support for the case) and having old glue and paper on there is a hindrance.
Usually when separating a case and a textblock, you can get rid of the original endsheet. Sometimes, though, the endsheet is particularly nice or important, and so you have to adjust your methods. (If you don't save it, you need to sew on new endsheets.) Usually that means that you keep it on the text block and just left enough of it to slip in the overhang of your spine lining. In the case of this dictionary, though, I was actually putting it into an entirely new case, so I had to carefully remove the endsheet from the board. I found this, which amused me enough that I took a picture of it:
Because sometimes, you know, you need to be reminded which one is the front endsheet and which one is the back:
The weird bits of white paper sticking out are a type of fibrous sheet called reemay, which, happily enough, does not stick to paste, and so is very useful for when one is doing paper repairs and does not want one page to stick to another. (This one had a fair number of torn pages to repair. Page mends tend to be fairly tedious, unfortunately, but they're the most common repair you'll ever had to do.)
If you look to the right, you'll also notice my spatulas, which are very useful for scraping one thing away from another. That's how I got the endsheet away from the board.
Once your case is off, your various pages are mended, etc. etc., you may have to look at how the book is put together. Is it sewn, or put together using plastic adhesive? (That's how paperbacks today are done, and a fair number of commercial hardbacks, too.) If it's sewn, is the sewing structure still stable? (Ooh, alliteration.)
If the sewing structure has been destroyed over the years, you will probably need to resew the book:
Usually I do this sort of thing on a frame, but my coworkers at the LC didn't usually use sewing frames, and I was determined to try their methods and see how they worked for myself. (My conclusion: I could manage, but dear lord, it is ever so much more helpful to use a frame. You don't have to waste a lot of time constantly making sure that your tapes are taut.)
Even if you don't need to resew the entire book, you will probably need to sew on new endsheets, unless you're saving the old endsheets or the paper is too delicate for sewing, in which case you'll have to hinge them in using paste and strong-yet-flexible Japanese paper.
Once your book is stable, your endsheets are on, and your spine is lined (paper, and then cloth — at Wesleyan, we use a different technique involving something called a hollow tube, which I actually like much better, but the LC way is faster), then it's time for the case.
In the picture beneath, I actually created an entirely new case for the text block, since the boards of the original case were no longer strong enough. Whether it's a new case or the original case, however, you place the textblock in the case the way you want it to fit, and then paint PVA (polyvinyl acetate, a type of adhesive) across the endsheet in a thin layer. Press the board down, make sure there are no wrinkles, repeat on the other side, and then let it sit in a press for a while, and voila! You have a book.
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